


The Pretty One?

by TheSigyn



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-11
Updated: 2011-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-15 13:54:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4609221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Tardis called him the "pretty one"? Rory can't understand it. Maybe he doesn't really want to. Takes place within a day or two of The Doctor's Wife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Pretty One?

**Author's Note:**

> Extra points to anyone who can recognize which companions!

  
  
Rory was a little chagrined as the three of them clambered back into the Tardis. He was still clutching his shirt in his hands, but he didn’t want to put it back on, what with all the green slime and... whatever else that was. “Thanks for getting me out of there,” he said to his companions.   
  
Amy was not happy. “Getting her filthy paws all over my Rory!” she muttered.   
  
“She didn’t mean anything by it,” Rory said, embarrassed.   
  
“Princess Gadabout had you half naked!”   
  
“Look, it wasn’t my idea!”  
  
“Leave him alone,” the Doctor said pushing through them on his way to the console. “Women fall all over him. He can’t help it. After all, he is ‘the pretty one.’” He said it with a certain scorn.   
  
Amy grinned at him. “Jealous, are you?”   
  
The Doctor scowled. The truth was, neither the princess nor any of her handmaidens had had any interest in him. He knew it was because his pheremones were the wrong chemical makeup compared to Rory’s — and frankly, he wouldn’t have been interested anyway — but it would have been nice to have been ASKED.   
  
Rory frowned. “You said that before,” he said. “In my head. When all that happened with... what was her name... Idris. The pretty one?”   
  
“The Tardis,” the Doctor said. “She called you that, not me. I thought she meant Amy. I was just repeating her.” He scoffed. “Frankly, questioning her sanity,” he added.   
  
“Or her ability to see,” Amy quipped.   
  
“Or her experience with men.”   
  
“Or her understanding of the English language!”   
  
“Thank you!” Rory snapped, cutting off their banter. He stalked off toward their room. “I should have stayed with the princess, green skin, slimy anatomy and all. At least she treated me with some respect!”   
  
Amy only chuckled, and the Doctor grinned. Amy touched the Doctor’s shoulder as she passed him. “I’d better go take care of my idiot.”   
  
As Amy helped him shower, though, Rory couldn’t help but wonder. The pretty one? What on earth could the Tardis have meant?   
  
  
***  
  
  
“The pretty one.” Rory couldn’t get it out of his head. It had been bugging him for nearly twenty-four hours, now. “The pretty one?” he asked again.   
  
He was trying to find the library, which seemed to have moved again, and he kept wandering deeper and deeper into the corridors of the Tardis. After having them twist and turn under the control of the House, Rory no longer felt any fear of them. The malevolence of the House had been so pervasive in every corner. The Tardis’s own benign contentment was just as pervasive, and her obvious consciousness was something he now found comforting. She used to scare him, but now he knew her — could see her as a person. Had held her as she died. He knew she’d take care of him, so he just kept walking, peering into exciting fountain-studded galleries and lovely heart-shaped boudoirs as he looked for his actual destination.   
  
But he still couldn’t get it out of his head.   
  
“Okay,” he said finally, looking up at the ceiling. “What on earth could you mean by ‘the pretty one?’”  
  
There was a heavy weight in his mind, as if something was being tapped, someone knocking at the door. Rory shook his head, a shiver running down his spine. The Tardis had tried to answer him, and he had utterly failed to understand. Ah well.   
  
He turned the corner and found himself in a gallery. The corridor had been filled with paintings and frescos, mosaics and blurry black and white photographs, all jumbled together haphazardly across the walls and the floor. At first Rory was simply bemused.  
  
Then, unfortunately, he looked more closely.   
  
  
***  
  
“Doctor, have you seen Rory?” Amy asked.   
  
“What?”  
  
“He said he went down to the library, but I just looked, and I didn’t see him.”   
  
The Doctor looked up. “What?”   
  
“Rory’s missing.”   
  
“Rory’s not missing!” the Doctor said with giddy annoyance. “He’s fine, he’s just lost, happens all the time in the Tardis, she’s still finding her feet after all those rooms I deleted.”   
  
“Wait a minute,” Amy said. “Rory’s LOST? I have to go find him.”  
  
The Doctor jumped up and stood before her. He could sense her panic.  
  
“Move!” Amy said. “I can’t let him get lost in the corridors, I—”  
  
“Don’t. The Tardis is confused, clearly. Usually if you get lost you’ll be sent back toward the console room. I don’t want you getting lost, too. No end of trouble when that happens. Head to the kitchens, make us a nice cup of tea for when I find him, will you, there’s a good girl, I’m off, stay put!” And the Doctor danced off down the corridor leaving Amy shaking her head.   
  
“Find him quickly!” she shouted after him.   
  
“Always!” he shouted back.   
  
In truth, the Doctor was worried. The Tardis was acting very strange today. There was some kind of psychic weight tracing through her corridors as she rearranged her systems, and he wondered if Rory had gotten caught in some inadvertent maze near the lower levels.  
  
He wandered on for a long time trying to follow a very faint psychic trace. “Where are you leading him, girl?” he asked the Tardis when he got to a cross roads. She sent him something amused and annoyed at once. “No, he’s not very easy to lead. Where is he?”   
  
The lights turned off on one set of corridors, so he followed the one that was still lit. As he turned he found himself in one of the Tardis’s more eccentric corners, what appeared to be a haphazard gallery of human faces. The Tardis was clearly cleaning up her data banks, or maybe placing some of her records for storage in this corridor. The Doctor frowned, checking images, wondering why he didn’t recognize any of them.   
  
He didn’t recognize Rory until he nearly tripped over him. Amy’s husband was curled up on the floor with his eyes shut tight, holding onto his head as if he was trying to force out the world. “Stop it,” he was whispering to himself. “Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it!” His arms were shaking with the effort of holding himself together.  
  
“Rory!” The Doctor fell to his knees.   
  
“Doctor?” Rory breathed. “Please. I can’t make it stop.”  
  
“What’s going on? What is it?”   
  
“Get me out of here,” he whispered. He opened his eyes for a brief second, caught a glimpse of one of the faces, and cringed away from the sight, shutting his eyes tight again. “I can’t stop it, I can’t find my way out...!”   
  
“Rory, look at me. Just at me,” the Doctor said, placing his hands like blinders on either side of Rory’s face.   
  
Rory opened his eyes, but he shook his head. “They’re still there. I can feel them, pulled from inside me. She’s drawing them.... Oh, god, stop it!”   
  
“Who is she? What’s happened, Rory. Answer me!”   
  
“I just wanted to know what she meant!” Rory cried. “Pretty one?” he said. “No one’s ever said anything like that. Weirdo, yes. Geek, certainly. Big nose, wanker, gay boy, sure, but pretty one, never. I mean, what did she mean? And then she did this, and I can’t... close the door!” Rory shut his eyes again, his fists clenched. Particularly his right one, which he was holding against his chest as if it might betray him. The hand that once held an Auton blaster.   
  
“Oh, Rory,” the Doctor murmured. He thought he knew what was going on, but he needed to confirm it. “Where are we? Who are all these people?”   
  
“They’re people... I knew. While I waited, people I... Oh, god stop it. Stop it!”   
  
The Doctor sighed. “I can’t get her to stop. You asked a question, and the Tardis is answering you. She can’t talk. She won’t stop until you understand, even if she’s hurting you. She doesn’t think like a person.”   
  
Rory sobbed and banged his head against the fresco on the wall behind him. “Oooh!” he moaned.   
  
The Doctor went through his options, and finally realized he couldn’t avoid it. Two thousand years was something an Auton structural pattern could hold and understand, but a human brain had limits, and the Tardis had far overreached them. That was why Rory’s mind had created a door, to keep the knowledge from overwhelming him. That door was forced open, now, and there was only one way to help him. “Ooh, I’m going to regret this,” The Doctor said, and touched his forehead to Rory’s. “Just calm down. Breathe and let me in. Anything you don’t want me to see, just hold up a red flag.”  
  
The Doctor was fighting a very tough battle. The Tardis was insistent that she get her point across, and was forcing Rory’s consciousness to look at what his human brain was not built to encompass for more than a moment or two. He hadn’t wanted to invade Rory’s mind — he thought it rude; it was a little like feeling him up, though in a non-sexual way. But you’ll feel someone up if they have a thorn lodged in their flesh, and mentally, this was worse. Finally, after long moments, Rory relaxed. The Doctor pulled away, covering his shaking by bouncing up the wall.   
  
“What did you do?” Rory asked, his face perplexed. “I still... but it’s not....”   
  
“I built you a window,” the Doctor said, glad he could keep his voice under control. “Two thousand years behind a door in your head, and the Tardis is forcing that door open. Well, she wants you to look, so I made her a window, and now she’ll let the door close. Sorry I can’t make her stop completely.”   
  
“Will I... always?”   
  
“No. When she stops drawing on your memories the shutters will close, just like the door does.”   
  
Rory took in a deep breath and opened his eyes fully. “Good,” he breathed. “I rather like not remembering. Access to a memory is one thing, but....” He sighed and let it go. His gaze wandered slowly around him, but the images on the walls no longer seemed to be causing him active pain. Merely a distant melancholy. Each memory was just a story, now, almost someone else’s story, like a television show he’d once seen. A long, long, interminable television series that reinvented itself over the years, but still held one central character and one big box.   
  
“Sorry about that,” Rory said. “It was just... too much at once. Usually I don’t... SEE it all like that.”   
  
“Who are they all?” the Doctor asked, waving at the walls.  
  
Rory sighed. “People I knew. People I... helped.” He touched a mosaic of a bright haired Saxon girl. “People who helped me. I mean I... I was there a long time. It got... lonely.”   
  
The Doctor frowned. “I told you...”  
  
“I never regretted it,” Rory barked at him. “Never once. But I... I’m a nurse. I could be of use to people, I - I found things to fill the time.”  
  
“Friends,” the Doctor murmured.   
  
Rory touched another portrait, this time an antique daguerreotype of a young woman about fourteen. “Yes.”  
  
The Doctor looked about him. Two thousand years of relationships, both casual and profound gazed back at Rory through soulless eyes. Two thousand years of people who now had probably never really existed, as the universe had rearranged itself. Two thousand years of human beings, their hopes and defeats, their triumphs and tribulations, hundreds of lives retained only behind a plastic door in Rory’s mind.   
  
“They all have a story behind them,” Rory said. “Some have entire lives. Some kept coming back to me, as they aged, and I stayed the same, eternal and unchangeable. A plastic doll. Some of them wanted me to leave the Pandorica, to come with them...” He touched another image, this time of a French child.  
  
“You were never tempted?”   
  
“Of course I was tempted,” Rory said. “Every day I was tempted. But... Amy was my world. And I’d killed her. I couldn’t....” He sighed. “I owed her. The time was my penance.”   
  
“It wasn’t your fault.”  
  
“That doesn’t matter. I needed to do it.”   
  
“Why?”   
  
“If you’d done something terrible, and there was something you could do that would make you feel better...?” He left it open.   
  
“Assuage the guilt, you mean?” the Doctor said. He shook his head. “There’s no penance big enough.”  
  
“Oh. Sorry.”  
  
“That’s all right.”   
  
Rory closed his eyes as more images appeared around the corner. “Why is the Tardis doing this?”  
  
“She’s answering your question. What makes you the pretty one. She’s more cerebral than physical — she isn’t physical at all. It’s what’s in your head she finds pretty.”  
  
“This?” Rory asked, waving wildy at the portraits. “All this pain?”   
  
“No.”   
  
“Well, that’s all this is. I don’t want to think about all the people I’ve loved and lost waiting for Amy.”  
  
“This is what the Tardis sees as pretty. I don’t know what about it. The time itself, maybe, curled into your mind. The fact that you kept reaching out, knowing they’d all die or leave you. Maybe just your taste in friends. I don’t always understand her.”   
  
“But you love her,” Rory said.   
  
“That’s what you call it.”  
  
“Is there any better word?”   
  
The Doctor shrugged. “You spent two thousand years loving a soul inside a box, how am I any different?”   
  
Rory chuckled. “I suppose you’re right. But I don’t see how that makes me the pretty one.”   
  
“Maybe that’s exactly what makes you the pretty one,” the Doctor said, realizing what the Tardis was driving at. “Maybe...” he glanced at Rory, but didn’t say what he was thinking. It was embarrassing. He looked instead at the gallery of faces. Some of them showed up several times in different guises. Sometimes facial features repeated themselves through different eras, generations of families who had befriended the Last Centurion.  
  
“A lot of them are children,” the Doctor murmured.   
  
Rory looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “A lot of them were.” He looked back to the portraits, wandering down the corridor of his memories. “I was something of a phantom of the opera. I only let myself be seen by those who could accept some eccentric alien warrior who knew both the future and the past and didn’t really fit into either of them.” The Doctor was very still as Rory continued, “Those kinds of people are usually children.”  
  
“Is that the only reason?”   
  
Rory glanced at him. “Yes, I like children. It that what you want me to say?”   
  
“Do you want children?” the Doctor asked, and Rory blinked.   
  
“What’s that got to do with it?”  
  
The Doctor shrugged.   
  
“I don’t know. It’s not fair to ask me that. Especially not after Amy lost a....” Rory looked back to the portraits. “For two thousand years I couldn’t have any,” he said. “Even if I had forgotten Amy, or postponed her, even if I could have fallen in love with someone else... which I don’t think I could, by the way. I was plastic, it was really hard to change my opinion about anything, including my wardrobe. But...” he touched another painting, this time of a brown haired little boy in Viking garb. “Even if I’d found someone to love, I wasn’t... human. It couldn’t have worked out.” He shook his head.   
  
“Yes, I do want kids," he admitted. "The idea that we nearly had a baby, and didn’t, hurts. I would like to be a father, to have a tiny blend of me and Amy, something to prove we were together. Some sign of continuity which would make me immortal in a way that that endless, repetitive monotony of a solitary life could not.” He glanced at the Doctor, who was staring into one of the portraits without really seeing it. Rory suddenly realized what he’d just said... and who he had said it to. He opened his mouth to apologize, and then decided it wasn’t worth it. The Doctor knew who he was. He didn’t need Rory to remind him. Or the Tardis.  
  
Unfortunately the Tardis was in a mood to communicate. They rounded the next bend, and Rory found himself in blissfully unfamiliar territory. “Okay,” he said, glancing at the portraits on the walls, photographs and tender paintings and strong computer generated images and rough charcoal wall sketches like cave art. “Who are all these, then?”  
  
“Nothing,” the Doctor said too quickly, taking hold of Rory’s arm. “Nothing at all. Let’s just go.” He tried to pull Rory back into the other corridors of Rory’s memories.   
  
“No,” Rory said, and set himself to examining the painless images before him of faces he had never known in any life. He didn’t want to go back. “Who are they all?”   
  
“Just, ah... friends of mine, that’s all.”  
  
“Friends?” Rory said, looking at a portrait of a young woman in a mini skirt and sixties go-go boots. “What kind of friends?”  
  
“Friends,” the Doctor said.   
  
“Like Amy?” Rory asked, staring at a fierce little charcoal sketch of a girl in what appeared to be a leather leotard. She looked rather like Amy.   
  
“And you,” the Doctor said. “Sort of.”   
  
“Are these people who traveled with you?”   
  
The Doctor’s eye had been caught by an Aztec relief carving of an older woman with a gold coin in her hand. “Mostly,” he murmured.   
  
Rory stared at a portrait of a wide-eyed teenage boy with a star pinned on his chest. “A lot of them are teenagers,” he said simply.  
  
“Yes,” the Doctor said. “A lot of them were.”   
  
Rory blinked at him as understanding slowly dawned in his mind. “Just a preference thing?” Rory asked. “Or is it that most actual children are too young to travel?”  
  
The Doctor closed his eyes as his head sank.   
  
The understanding finally settled, and Rory had his answer. The Tardis gave a satisfied hum, and the pictures began to fade. Rory watched as a photograph of girl in a red bikini on a rock by the ocean faded into blank wall. It made sense. The Tardis loved the Doctor. The thing the Tardis had found pretty about Rory was that they were — or at least had been — the same.   
  
The difference was that Rory was free of it. The eternal alien life as the last of his kind, his greatest love a cold and unresponsive box, unable to live a normal life, unwilling to remember, unable to forget. All of that was ELSEWHERE, for Rory. It was here and now for the Doctor.  
  
Well. Rory knew the solution. He’d used it himself. It always ended, and the ending was always sad, but between the sorrow there was joy and laughter and friendship. When it hurt too much and you stayed away from people, it only got worse. Rory slapped his hand on the Doctor’s shoulder, resting it there, a weight dragging him back from the past. “Do you have any idea where we are?” he asked, “because I told Amy I’d be just twenty minutes.”  
  
“Yeah, she was looking for you,” the Doctor said, still a little shaken. “She was worried.”   
  
“Well, House gave her some nasty visions of me in the corridors,” Rory said.   
  
The Doctor led on through the corridors, and Rory followed. As they walked Rory caught him muttering, “The pretty one, indeed!”   
  
“Yeah, weird. Thing is, though...” he looked at the Doctor sidelong. “That must mean the Tardis finds you flat gorgeous.”  
  
The Doctor blushed and hurried on ahead. “Still shut up,” he said brusquely.   



End file.
